Dog Days of Summer

“What are you doing this summer?”

Most people will mention some internship or an adventure abroad, but the Harvard baseball team has a different norm: playing ball.

“It’s a culture,” said junior first baseman Robert Wineski, who has spent his last two summers playing in a Hawaiian baseball league. “Everyone on the team has done it at least once. [Harvard] coach [Joe] Walsh stresses it. The coaches really push you to play in a summer league…. I don’t know a kid who played four years of Harvard baseball and didn’t play in a summer league.”

“When you’re playing on these summer teams, you’re playing with and against guys from other major colleges,” Walsh said. “When you have some success there, you bring that confidence back each year.”

In the leagues, ballplayers from all over the country suit up for as many games—sometimes more—in the summer as they do in a collegiate season. Their weeks revolve around baseball, and depending on the league in which they play, they suit up almost every day of the summer.

“If you go 0-4 on a Sunday in the Ivy League, you have to wait until Saturday to get up again, and it’s tough,” Walsh said. “But during the summer, just playing each day and getting practice…can really help you.”

The process of finding summer teams starts for Harvard in the fall when the coaches place players in various leagues across the country, choosing spots where they feel the players would best fit.

In the six-week-long Hawaiian league, Wineski, along with fellow juniors Kyle Larrow and Jordan Haviland, played baseball games six days a week while living in the same hotel with the rest of the league’s players.

“It’s just the way I think the game is supposed to be played—lots of games,” Wineski said. “You just roll out and have a great time.... And imagine being in a hotel with a hundred guys in Hawaii looking to have a very good time.”

But not all programs are the same.

Junior pitcher Joey Novak had a much different experience in the Northwoods League in Minnesota, which plays 70 games over the course of 10 weeks.

“You get in a routine where, if you’re at home, you wake up pretty late, you hang out, you go to the field at three, do some batting practice, go get some food, come back, get ready for the game, play,” Novak said. “After the game, heat and then get a lift in, maybe. Then you go back and go to sleep.”

Unlike the Hawaiian League that plays all of its games in the same general area, the Northwoods League includes roadtrips that average three hours.

“There are a lot of hotel rooms where you’re just kind of waiting around,” Novak recalled. “Everything’s revolving around playing every day.”

Though the summer leagues can be intense, Walsh feels they are vital to a player’s and a team’s success.

“Baseball is a game that when you’re playing on a daily basis, that’s when you make your improvements,” he said. “I’ll be giving Joey a start [against the University of Arizona this weekend] just based on what he did during the summer…. His fastball really improved throwing every day.”

Senior pitcher Brent Suter—who played in the top-tier Cape Cod League with classmate Jeff Reynolds last summer—agreed.

“I was struggling mechanically a lot last season, and the pitching coach [in Cape Cod] really helped me a lot,” Suter said. “By the end of the summer, I felt it was coming together for me.”

But no matter the level of play or location, the player consensus is that one of the best parts about playing over the summer is the people.

“Just meeting all these kids from different parts of the country and from all these different schools is so great,” Wineski said. “I mean, I still talk to kids from two summers back.... You build this network of friends. That’s by far the biggest thing I’ve taken away from these summers—the relationships I’ve built with all these other kids.”

Though Wineski and the rest of the Hawaiian League stayed in a hotel together, in most other leagues, players reside with host families. Suter, whose host family had two young boys, grew close with his host brothers.

“It was great just going to the beach with them, hanging out, playing video games,” he recalled. “Everyday activities were really special.”

While the players sacrifice their summers in order to improve their game for Harvard and, in some cases, to get drafted, Walsh believes in the experience that the leagues present his players.

“It’s a lot better than going to Wall Street,” Walsh said. “And you can print that.”

—Staff writer Taryn I. Kurcz can be reached at tkurcz13@college.harvard.edu.